Just for context, when its predecessor RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, came in it was said to be used only for cases such as terrorism etc.. Instead, it was found that councils started using to check people were putting things in the right rubbish bins for collection.

Robust safeguards indeed.

I've honestly no idea if it's possible, but if they could find a way to get Steam Input into there or the equivalent of their own then I could use it. I have an original Steam Controller, you used to be able to use it on non-Steam games but for a few releases now Steam took that ability away. Some way of emulating or creating an alternative to Steam Input would be superb.

Check your player's handbook, it's definitely an upgrade from studded leather.

Are you nuts? This is the most interesting news in quite some time, at least from a nerd perspective.
This story has everything you'd want- an insufficient randomization problem, a software bug that makes it subtlety fail and take the wrong path that makes a lot of keys guessable, and then, years later, an eventual exploit where someone, offline, reproduced a ton of these failed key creations, checked the blockchain to see which ones had stuff, set up a burst of activity that would move all the bitcoin at essentially the same time.

It has all kinds of interesting angles- for instance, you can ask if the writers of the software actually were the same as the eventual hackers years later. It's possible that this bug was deliberate, and plenty of cryptocrimes are actually inside jobs. You can also ask why people are so into the idea of hardware wallets in the first place, as using the reference wallet produces a wallet.dat that can be encrypted with veracrypt and stored in a zillion places (and so can the password), and why is that not the first order of business for people looking to store assets with big numbers? Or someone could come in and advertise their own favorite cold wallet instead.

This is a very solid and interesting news story.

For several years now, any reasonable simple question has had Search-Engine-Optimized useless shit at the top of google- these days it generally can be counted on to fill the entire first page. Google helpfully highlights the relevant text by default so they spend money making sure google can't displau that text but instead displays an ad.

I just googled:
odds of rolling three sixes on three dice

The AI has the 1/216 answer and the reasoning and the math and the links to the people on forums explaining all that. That is actually the search engine right there; it actually links me to people who have explained this to each other over the years.

The top link is to reddit and claims the odds are "180 to where", and eventually has a bunch of links (reddit and google signed an agreement to stop other search engines from reading reddit well). If I click in there I will find the answer. But what if it wasn't?

Under that is stackexchange, and all the wording is chosen so I can't see the answer. Clicking through the answer is present at least. Below that is a dice probability calculator that can make the answer, and something called thoughtco which has the answer in the summary. This is the first non-AI spot on the page with the answer.

Overall the AI summary has been godsent, but if more time has been spent fighting SEO it would not be so needed.

"AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control."

No, it paints a picture of incompetents who don't know how to air-gap. Cutting edge? Lab agents: "Please hack this thing". LLM: "I have hacked this thing". Lab agents: "OMG. Sentience!".

If it's drawing on training data that has humans talking about, lets take a recent example, model x on Hugging Face being a good way to break a boundary and its been told it break boundaries then of course it's going to go to Hugging Face and talk to model x. This isn't unpredictable.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Although, from my two second check just now, Venus is technically considered within the Goldilocks zone for this solar system it is right on the very inner edge of it. This finding differs from Venus in that respect, making it more interesting as a possibility.

All highly speculative of course, but to be fair that's exactly what the article says. Atmosphere detected, everything else speculative.

Tiling windows is one of those features some power users simply love, and yes, there are ways to make it happen on KDE and GNOME with third-party apps or extensions,

For KDE Plasma, tiling is available natively via a dragging/snapping mechanism since well... basically forever. No need for any extension, special script, or extra plugin. There are stuff that improve tiling, but basic tiling functionality is there right from the start.

I work as a translator, and I usually have a virtual desktop with two windows side by side, one for the source text, other for the ongoing translation, and I use KWin's tiling mechanics that come in Plasma by default to arrange these windows.

This is just an example. TFA guy obviously is talking about something he doesn't know at all.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Years back I was interviewing people for a coding position. We went through the standard tech stuff and then did a bit of project to see how they thought. We said (this is circa 2009'ish I think) - imagine you're on a team creating a new phone. You don't have time to test all the functions, so which would be your top two functions to ensure working?

All a bit Kobayashi Maru - obviously you can't release a phone testing only two functions, but we wanted to see what they'd prioritise. The very best answer we received was this one: "I would make sure it has the ability to call emergency services." Their thinking was that this was likely the most critical feature of a phone for both a user, and also for the manufacturer to avoid being sued. Absolutely great answer.

And yet here we are, with the post above. Taking the thinking of this interviewee - the ability to work with emergency services is important for general society, for the user of the vehicle (so they don't get in trouble) and for the manufacture of the vehicle (so they don't get fined/sued/both). Absolutely critical.

I'm on my third set of LUENX sunglasses. When I inevitably lose this pair (the fate of all my sunglasses), I'll probably buy another. I want purple shiny polarized glasses, they sell those. The say LUENX on the sides. The microfiber cloth that comes with them says LUENX. The little test card for polarization says LUENX (you can only read it through polarized lenses, of course).

So how are these a sketchy brand, or a knockoff, or whatever? These things work fine, arrive at my door the next day, and are like 15 bucks. Am I to believe that these are somehow a bad buy for 15 bucks? Am I to be enraged that I could probably get them for 9 dollars if I went directly to their website, or to alibaba or something?

Anyone have a suggestion for a nice pair of shiny purple polarized sunglasses- ones that aren't Luxotica (aka EssilorLuxottica these days)?

Likely bots.

Of course, it would be nice if we could get a native version of Office 365. My needs are mostly covered with LibreOffice but I need sometime the real MS Office to test compatibility with some documents supplied by my clients.

Other than that, there are still some games that won't run on Linux, mostly because the kernel-level anticheat malware prevents that.

There's also some niche apps that only offer versions for Windows or Mac or Android/iPhone, but not for Linux. My digital signature with SignCloud has no app for Linux.